I cannot think of a better way to celebrate Halloween than an
article about ghosts, goblins, and witches. These creatures live
In the South Carolina Low Country too, but we call them haints,
plat-eyes, and hags.

The South Carolina Low Country
has always provided fertile ground for those creepy creatures
inhabiting the night. Haints, hags, and plat-eyes provided convenient
explanations for the unexplainable. Earlier generations, who
were mostly uneducated, confirmed their existence. Please note
that I said uneducated, not ignorant. It takes an intelligent
group of people to create a ghost story plausible enough pass
from generation to generation. The storytellers of the Low Country
were experts when it came to constructing intricate tales to
explain the strange behavior of friends and neighbors. It was
simple; you just said a haint, a hag, or a plat-eye got them.

This is a good time to explain
haints, hags, and plat-eyes. It's important to know what you're
dealing with if you ever come across one of these critters on
a dark, moonless night when you're somewhere you ought not to
be, or even if you're just lying at home in your bed.

Hags are similar to witches
in that they are women, but that is where the similarity ends.
Hags do not ride brooms or gather 'round boiling pots cooking
up spells. Hags are loners and very independent creatures. Do
not get the idea that Hags are old crones; some are beautiful
young women. Any woman could be a hag. Your wife could be a hag.
So could your mother-in-law. In the daylight, hags are just your
ordinary run-of-the-mill women; it is at night that they become
creatures of torment.

As darkness falls, a hag sheds
her skin and becomes a diaphanous, semi-spirit floating through
the night air searching out her victim. A hag comes while you
are sleeping, slipping into your house through a keyhole, an
open window, a mouse hole, or a chink in the wall. Once inside,
the hag will "ride" you throughout the long night.
People ridden by a hag wake up feeling tired and out of sorts,
although they slept soundly through the night. Creatures that
prey on you while you are asleep are the hardest to protect against,
unless you stay awake all night.

The residents of the South
Carolina Low Country have come up with a variety of remedies
to combat hags. You can keep a hag from entering your house by
painting the windows and doorframes robin's- egg blue. (This
will work for plat-eyes too.) Other defenses include placing
a handful of mustard seeds on the floor near your doors and windows.
A hag will stop and pick up every one of those mustard seeds
before continuing into the house. (Does that sound like anyone
you know? I sure have someone in mind.) Propping a broom upside
down next to your door works too. The hag will count every straw
in that broom before continuing into your room.

You can try hanging a horseshoe
above your door. The hag will tread every mile of roadway traveled
by that horseshoe before it can attack its victim. I would try
to get one from a horse that pulled carriages around Central
Park or the French Quarter. A horseshoe from the days of the
Pony Express would not be a bad idea either. These are all effective
remedies to combat a hag once it has picked out your house to
do its mischief, but a smart hag will figure a way around all
of these barriers. Hags can be very adept at counting straws
and mustard seeds. However, more often than not, they will just
find an opening that you neglected to protect.

There are some so-called last
measures of defense you can use to protect yourself even as a
hag is about to ride you. You can put a flour sifter with a fork
underneath it over your face. You will probably wake up when
the hag starts whispering as she counts all the holes in the
sifter. Then, you can pull the flour sifter off your face and
pin the hag inside it with the fork. Just keep the hag pinned
until sunrise and it will be too late for her to return to her
skin.

Well, we have beaten the hags
to death, so now we will talk about haints. Haints are dead people
whose souls cannot rest. A haint can take the form of a ghost
or a person. For example, the Gray Man of Pawleys Island is a
haint. He is the ghost of an old sea captain who appears before
each hurricane to warn the residents off the island. On our vacations
to Pawleys Island, we have often stayed at the Gray Man's former
home, the Tamarisk cottage, and my sister-in-law swears that
she saw him one night. I know if I drink enough of my brother-in-law's
margaritas, I start seeing things too, so who am I to doubt my
sister-in-law? If she says she saw the Gray Man, I believe her.

The nice thing about haints
is they are benign creatures, and, as in the case of the Gray
Man, often can be beneficial to humans. Haints are also predictable;
they just keep doing the same thing repeatedly. If a Haint is
a chain rattler, it will always be a chain rattler.

Well, I guess that just leaves
plat-eyes, the third and final creature in our Low Country version
of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Plat-eyes are spirits that
can take the form of other animals or objects. They are quite
aggressive, and haunt low-lying areas, such as swamps and old
rice fields. Plat-Eyes have front teeth, but no back teeth. When
they are not disguised as other creatures, plat-eyes have one
big eye, like a round plate; hence the name plat-eye. Plat-eyes
do not often leave the swirling mists from which they arise.
Therefore, if you stay away from the swamps and abandoned rice
fields, you should be safe. Legend has it that plat-eyes were
originally created to scare people away from buried treasures.
That works for us. We have told our children for years about
the plat-eyes in the marsh at Pawleys Island who keep people
away from the clams and crabs that are our buried treasures.

So, how does one protect oneself
from all these haints, hags, and plat-eyes that abound in the
Low Country? It is simple, really. You just get a conjure doctor
(they are in the Yellow Pages) to whip you up a boo-daddy. A
boo-daddy is made from a mixture of marsh mud, Spanish moss,
sweet grass, and saltwater. Once formed by the conjure doctor,
the boo-daddy is incubated inside a marsh oyster. Boo-daddies
renew their power every month, under the full moon, by going
back to drink the nectar from the marsh oysters. Boo-daddies
have large heads and shapeless bodies. They can fly through solid
objects and can protect you from a variety of evil spirits. The
more boo-daddies you have, the better protected you are.

There is an old Low Country
saying about boo-daddies. "If oonah be scairt o dem haints,
hags, n plat eyes what be roamin roun de streets afta dak, keep
yoself a boo-daddy in yo pocket or roun yo neck and dem scaries
be stayin way fum oonah an go mess wit somebody what aint got
no tekshun. Mo oonah hab da fadah dem scaries be runnin an stayin
gon fo good." (Translation: If you are afraid of ghosts,
witches, and goblins that roam the streets after dark, keep yourself
a boo-daddy in your pocket or around your neck and the scary
creatures will stay away from you and go frighten someone who
doesn't have any protection. The more you have, the farther those
creatures will run until they stay away forever.)

This Halloween, I'm carrying
a mess of Boo Daddies with me. You just never know who will show
up at your door, even way up here in the foothills of the North
Georgia Mountains.

Note: If you would like to
learn more about hags, haints, plat-eyes, and boo-daddies, I
can highly recommend "Ghosts of Georgetown" and "More
Ghosts of Georgetown" by Elizabeth Robertson Huntsinger.
These books should be available through Amazon.com. Ms. Huntsinger's
writings provided much of the material for this article.